Sunday, June 16, 2013

Finding Dad in the murals

We’re exploring how certain places have shaped our community personality, what we might learn from them and what some neighborhoods need to be healthy for next generations.

Let us know what places you have passion for, your concerns and hopes for those places. If you are getting things done in your community, we’d like to hear about that, too. Email Carolyn Washburn, editor and vice president.

A machinist carefully turns the rapid traverse wheel on a milling machine at the Cincinnati Milling Machine Co. as another worker stacks parts in what in 1933 was the world's largest machine-tool plant. / The Enquirer/Glenn Hartong

Never thought I would find my dad on the murals. But that is exactly what has happened.

While writing stories about the old industrial murals – 16 mosaic tributes to working men – that used to ring Union Terminal’s grand concourse, I have discovered stories about my dad. They came out of the blue. They took me by surprise. They left me in awe. And in tears.

These are stories about a man who cared for his family, who loved his work and who took pride in doing everything to perfection. They make for a great Father’s Day gift. They’re a present from a dad, gone too soon, but always present.

Looking back, I should have seen this coming. My dad was linked to this mission from the very beginning.

The whole thing started April 28. That’s when my Enquirer stories broke the news about efforts to save the nine endangered industrial murals that had been relocated to the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. That’s also when the Enquirer launched my quest to name all 35 men on the 16 murals. April 28 also happens to be my dad’s birthday.

Clifford John Radel, known to his family as Mr. Cliffie, would have been 93 this year. But that was not to be. His great heart gave out on him on Jan. 4, 1994. At the time, he was 73 going on 23. Strong as an ox and bull-headed and feisty – two traits common to all Radel males – Mr. Cliffie was always crafting something from scratch, helping someone or fixing something, from broken toys to broken hearts.

One thing he could not mend was his own heart. Suddenly, on a cold winter’s day, it just stopped working.

His heart warms the stories that came my way via the murals. These magnificent works of art pay tribute to hard work and the people who built Cincinnati. When visiting Union Terminal as a little kid and the airport as an older kid, I imagined seeing him on two murals, now stuck in one of the Northern Kentucky facility’s two closed terminals.

One mural showed men stacking flats of freshly cut bars of Ivory Soap at Procter & Gamble. That’s where my dad went to work right after World War II. The other mural showed a man adjusting a lever on a Made-in-Cincinnati milling machine. My dad ran that machine tool – simply known in certain parts of the world as a “Cincinnati” – at work. A black-and-while photo of him bending over a milling machine sits on my workbench. The picture was taken at the soap-maker’s Ivorydale plant.

Reality always topped my childhood imagination. In my heart, I knew he wasn’t on the murals. In my head, I always wondered who was.

Since the stories about saving the murals and naming the men on them first appeared, 867 readers have responded. Hundreds offered ideas about how to save the murals. Hundreds more think they can put a name to a face on a mural.

The son talked about his dad’s job and his work ethic. The work shown on the mural was hot and heavy. The plant had no air-conditioning. The soap was still warm. Each flat of bars of Ivory weighed more than 100 pounds. His dad never took sick days.

At the end of the conversation, Haden Jr. added:

“I used to have lunch with your dad every Wednesday for years at Ivorydale.”

By then, my dad had changed uniforms, from work grays to a white shirt. He had switched jobs, going from machinist to running P&G’s Cincinnati-based research and development machine shops.

Haden Jr. recalled one lunchtime conversation. An engineer joined them and told my dad how disappointed he must be that his only son did not become an engineer.

“Your dad looked up from his bowl of hot soup and gave him a cold stare,” Haden Jr. recalled. Then he gave him a piece of his mind.

He told the engineer that most people in his profession are jerks. Only he did not use a word that began with a “j.”

Then he “told that guy he was proud of you, how he always told you to do what you love and how much you love writing.”

After that, he went back to eating his soup.

Late one night, a month after talking with Haden Jr., I sat in my kitchen and tried to stare down a pile of unopened mural-related letters. At 11:34 p.m., oven clock time, the last letter was opened.

Eighty-three-year-old Charley Hurst was writing from Loveland.

He is not on any of the murals. But what he wrote will be forever in my heart.

Charley described in great detail, with drawings even, the “very hard, hot work” being done by the sheet metal workers in the Andrews Steel’s Newport Rolling Mill mural. Workers used long tongs to grab red-hot sheets of steel and flip them and then stack them, sheet after sheet, all day long for $2 an hour.

“I was 20, 21 years old,” Charley wrote, “strong & foolish, just out of the Navy in 1949. But not foolish enough to stay there.”

He found work as a technician at P&G. “Knew your dad real well. . . a brilliant man who knew everything about machining, design, blueprints, fabrication” ... and people.

“When I was hired at P&G,” he added, “I felt like I had died and gone to heaven.”

After reading his words, I felt the same way.

These stories made me glad I knew this guy called Mr. Cliffie. Made me proud to call him Dad.

See more of the murals

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